One thing, though, Mary, Technorati might work that way for top-level searches, but it doesn't seem to work that way for direct link searches. I wish she'd add IceRocket to her list. I'm getting more and more impressed with that every day.

We're interviewing Chris Jones, corporate vice president in charge of Windows Vista tomorrow and will ask him about the name, among other things.

Me, I had a mixed reaction when I first heard it. I, like Alex, was hoping for a unique name, but this is better than a lot of names I could have imagined. Microsoft has a deep consensus culture which makes it tough to come up with really edgy names. Heck, usually we come up with "Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005." Yeah, that kind of name really makes one's heart warm.

Over the past few days the name has been growing on me, though. Either way, it'll be a fun thing to debate for a while with my brother.

I see that MSN Virtual Earth "deleted" Apple's headquarters (that's the Register's headline, not mine). Sorry about that. I hear we're working on getting newer imagery. The imagery we have for Cupertino is from 1991, which was before Apple's headquarters was at that location (back then their headquarters was elsewhere in Cupertino -- you can see my childhood home, by the way real near there).

I note that Steve Lombardi is trying to keep a stiff upper lip about the whole thing over on the MSN Virtual Earth blog (he rightly points out that there are lots of places Virtual Earth is better than its competitors too) but it would have been better to praise Google for having done a great job and note that there's work yet to be done.

"I have 15 companies that I'm responsible for (I don't sit on all the boards - Chris Wand who works with me has several of the board seats - they are all listed on my web site on the left sidebar if you want to take a look.) 6 of them use .NET in meaningful ways."

The Virtual Earth team is blogging and is talking about some of the shortcomings in their system. Yes, we know some of our imagery is old. The team tells me they are working on getting that all updated.

In other news, Yahoo is buying Konfabulator. Yahoo has been making a bunch of great acquisitions lately. Buying companies I really respect and like.